Not on innovation alone: Politics and the Regulation of Television White Space

What is the point of putting URLs in text? They don't convey useful information to the reader, and they take up space and cause ugliness. Make sensible links, in which something useful is said to the reader and the URL is put where it belongs, in the href attribute of the link phrase.

How do you know? The Media Access Project, Public Knowledge, CDT, and the Consumer Federation of America are all involved in that conversation all the time. You seem also to overlook the importance of members of the House and Senate, who are chosen in a process known as democratic elections and who believe themselves to act in the public interest,

While a small portion of spectrum has been opened up into the public common, it was not a democratic exercise of public will.

See above.

When the decision making process itself is influenced by a few powerful social institutions, the continuation of these public benefits is far from certain. There is no guarantee that industry interests will not conflict with those of the public in the future.

On the contrary, there is a guarantee that they will conflict. So?

In his discussion on the psychology of social institutions, Arnold outlines how in the Middle Ages, traders and money lenders were able to produce a new system of social organization that overturned the feudal rules of law and economics. Similarly, as technology improves, many of the old rules of law and economics that used to regulate society will begin to break down, as we have seen to a small extent for property rights in the RF spectrum white space.

And many will not. So this isn't an argument, just something that sounds like argument for those who don't like actual analysis. I told you that you could hardly trust Arnold's historical accounts as anything other than creed statements. Here you are falling headfirst into the barrel. Technology changes, improvement is an opinion. As it does so, it determines the nature of legal change? That's a strong proposition requiring much more proof than you or anyone else can adduce. It conditions the nature of legal change? Even that is more than I think you could show. It accompanies legal change? Sure, but so what? No directionality can be implied, and no predictive power either. What you need is an analytical account of some relation between some technological change and the resulting system of property relations, so that we can begin to ask in what way similar processes are at work here. Or you could look for an approach based in some historical materialism that others have analytically justified.

This breakdown may lead to results that are publicly beneficial or detrimental, but in order to consistently allow these advancements to be beneficial a better process for regulatory decisions must be instituted. While the white space decision is a small step in the right direction, the broader question of setting up institutions to decide for the public benefit remains unanswered.

This is flummery. Could anything ever written about public policy not have concluded that we need a better regulatory process more fully committed to achieving public benefit?

You haven't explained anywhere what makes the difference between law and economics, on one hand, and politics on the other. Nor have you explained why unlicensed spectrum that was good for terrestrial TV receivers the size of, well, televisions, should be our particular concern in the era of devices for which a better antenna size is substantially smaller. Nor why spectrum that was good for high-power line of sight broadcasting meant to reach millions of people from the top of something very tall is also the spectrum you would most want for implementing mesh networking in a world where IP-based protocols will prevail over broadcast signals as well as circuit-switched networks, where everybody routes everybody else's packets around every corner using tiny amounts of power by broadcast standards, and where problems of interference caused by screaming at dumb fixed-frequency receiving devices are barely-remembered historical issues. In short, both the political and the technical analysis seem to me to need a careful editorial review.